PF66 BYV

Silver BMW 1 Series

• Since August, residents have been reporting PF66 BYV as sitting on Hollingbury Crescent in Hollingdean, without budging an inch.

• It isn’t a local car, and residents strongly suspect it belongs to a student who has just arrived for the new university year. This is a familiar pattern: students often bring their car with them to Brighton, move into their house share elsewhere in the city, and then leave the car in Hollingdean, unmoved for several months.

• For those who live here, the effect is simple but frustrating: yet another space lost for the long term, in one of the most pressured parts of the neighbourhood.

• PF66 BYV has been there since the summer and, if the usual pattern holds, may not move again until the end of the academic year (although many of these student cars do usually move for the Christmas break).

• This is not about a lack of options. All residents who live within controlled parking zones have permits available to them (where they live), and there are proper arrangements they could make for storing their cars with the university, particularly in the campus carparks.

• What happens instead is easier for them but harder for us: Hollingdean ends up carrying the burden, its streets used as a free car park for people with no connection to the area.